In 2012 we saw many changes in the way search results are delivered. Searches became much smarter, delivering contextual results (based on Google's Knowledge Graph) and including much more information on results pages.
One of the biggest changes was the influx of rich snippets in results, including:
- Articles – author name, profile photo and relevant Google+ data
- Recipes – an image, nutritional and cooking data
- Product reviews and ratings
- And much more.
In 2013, I think the practice of tagging webpages with microdata will become much more prevalent, which will in turn increase the relevancy of search results. In fact, yesterday Google announced a new tool included as part of Webmaster Tools that allows non-technical users to mark up their site content using a WYSIWYG interface.
Although the tool currently only supports Event data, more is certain to be on the way.
In addition to expanding on the existing schema data sets, I think that new rich snippet formats will be released in 2013, and they will encourage content managers to properly structure and mark up the data on their websites.
